The Silent Screams of Peeves the Poltergeist
by Rababil
Summary: Peeves just wants to die, fam.


"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA", I screamed without making a sound.

I tried to come up with a joke. I tried to come up with a rhyme. Anything to keep myself distracted for a tiny piece of eternity. But I was simply out of jokes. All the long gone people and things I knew, I had already finished making all the jokes and rhymes I could about them trillions and trillions years ago. Back when I could tell them to someone. Back when there was someone to laugh at them. Back when there was still light in the solar system. Back when the solar system existed.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA", I screamed silently.

"I should've held his hand. I should've hugged him." I thought bitterly for the zillionth time, "I should've hugged Pat and kept hugging him as I waited for the universe to tear itself apart. I should've... should've... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

I tried to focus my mind on something else, I was sick of regretting. But there wasn't a "something else" anymore. Except for the darkness. And the countless stars who were bright enough to declare their existent to tell me that there's light somewhere in the universe but not nearly enough around me to wipe any of the dark away. The stars only made me feel helpless, they were a more constant reminder of the darkness than the darkness itself. And I hated darkness, I loathed it. I was a creature of light and misadventures. I wasn't made for this. No one was made for this. Not the Bloody fucking Baron, not even the dementors.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" and I couldn't hear my own scream.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. It simply didn't make sense. I'm Peeves, I was a poltergeist. Popped into existence as a manifestation of the mischievousness of the Hogwarts students. When the Hogwarts students themselves are dead, what purpose does the existence of the manifestation of a tiny part of their personality have? Why didn't I just slowly fade away as everything living died? I wasn't a ghost who chose to wander this dimension forever because he was too afraid of what might come next after death. I didn't choose this, it wasn't my choice to exist and it wasn't my choice to keep existing.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" I dream that at some point in time, if it still exists, a miracle will happen and my screams will become audible. I know that it's impossible, but still.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

I was dropping water balloons on a bunch of first graders when it happened. A student started shrieking hysterically, her cat was convulsing on the floor, coughing up blood, it took 10 seconds for it to die. And 3 days for whatever disease it died from to spread and kill Hogwarts.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

There was two kinds of illnesses, you see. The mundane and the magical. Wizards could easily cure all kinds of mundane, muggle diseases, given time to find a spell or potion or whatever. They didn't even know what kind it was, the disease that killed humanity. They didn't even have the time to give it a name, much less to figure out a cure. And the disease didn't just kill humanity, it killed all things living. The centaurs and the elves and the mermen and all other magical and muggle creatures. It spared no one. Even the trees, all kinds of plant simply died. And just like that, the earth was a dead planet.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

A part of the Hogwarts students and staff had went back to their family to die alongside them. A part stayed. The hospital wing was overflowed. They had to make up place in the great hall. A place where death could find all of them together. Some of the students left the room to go to their safe places. Maybe a bathroom stall, maybe a usually empty room, maybe fuckever. Some of them just fell down and died in the corridor.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

I tried to help everyone, brought water to the ones who wanted it, tried to cheer them up with my lame jokes. I was the only tangible thing with a mind left standing in Hogwarts. And so after they all died, I dug a great hole beside the Hogwarts lake and dragged the bodies down there to bury them. The paintings and the ghosts simply watched me, they couldn't help, they were all intangible. They only helped in annoying me.

"Dig the hole deeper, Peeves."

"Fly them here instead of dragging them like that, Peeves."

"Wipe all that blood, Peeves."

"Just let them rot, Peeves. We could use them as food, Peeves."

"Don't throw my body near that fucking mudblood, come on, Peeves."

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

Pat was a newly made ghost then, was in the seventh grade when he died of the disease, he was going around giving some speech, "Nature took its revenge. We overpopulated the planet. So it killed all things living. It rebooted its system so it can start over."

Pat liked to pretend he was a little bit of scientist or something, he only read some tabloids and sci-fi books. I shot him a dirty look and he shut up.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

I was in denial, I couldn't accept that humanity was simply dead. I was purposeless in a lifeless planet. I annoyed a bunch of ghosts and paintings for a while and quickly grew tired of it. One day, I decided I'll leave Hogwarts to search the planet and find life. A part of humanity must have survived this. Muggles probably have people stashed away in bunkers in case something like this ever happened. Some of the ghosts joined me but they soon lost interest and left. They all did, except Pat. He stuck around.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. AAAAAAA. AAAAAAAA."

Pat was more annoying then helpful. He used to beg me to collect and carry books whenever he saw something he felt like reading. And when we took a pause in our journey for some reason, he'd beg me to turn the pages of the books for him. He'd make me bust into houses so we could watch movies on computers or whatever. Pat was a muggleborn, he knew how to make those muggle devices work. Pat was a distraction to my mission but I liked the company anyway. Because maybe I subconsciously knew that I was only being a fool, that the planet was dead. We traveled for years and years and years and maybe even centuries, no one was around to keep track of time, through so many places. Mountains and deserts and forests and lands that civilization forgot long before its death. But we never found anything that lived. Only bones and skeletons of things that used to. I buried them, I buried them all. I didn't do it out of respect for the dead, people and animals I never personally knew, it simply became a hobby of sort for me. Something I did just for the sake of doing it.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

"Why did I survive, Pat? When all things living died?" I had once asked him, "I'm not dead like you, you can't die again but I'm supposed to be able to."

"You never lived, Peeves." Pat told me "You always simply existed."

Life... no, existence wasn't that bad back then actually, with Pat along me, days weren't that hard to pass by. I used to think otherwise back then but now, now I'd give anything to get that back. I'd massacre the whole damn earth over and over again to get that back. I'd do anything.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. PLEASE. PLEASE. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

Someone in a movie Pat once made me watch had said, "When earth starts to settle, God throws a stone at it."

Me and Pat had taken a pause from our journey. We just chose a house near a beach and started to live there after burying the bones of its owners. We told ourselves it was only for a while and we'd move out the next day or the day after it but we never did. There, we almost started to settle down. And so, a stone was thrown.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

One day, the sea levels suddenly rose up and drove us out of our house by flooding it. And with that, a savage fucking hail storm started brewing out of fuckever, I had to turn intangible.

Pat told me to look up at the sky and I could see the moon. And the moon was getting bigger. Except Pat told me in a dry voice that that wasn't the moon. That was a rogue planet, that was what causing all the climatic disorders. A planet not bound to a star. An orphan globe wandering around the galaxy without a destiny. Coming right at earth's path, destined to clash.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

The both of us couldn't do anything but watch as the planet kept getting bigger. Dirt and water rose from the ground, attracted to the planet's gravity. Trees and houses got uprooted, went right through our bodies to meet the planet. Even the both of us, even tho we were intangible, could feel a vague pull of the planet.

Pat's voice had trembled, "Peeves, will you hold my hand?"

I didn't. I don't know why. I was in a daze. I moved away from him.

And the two planets moved toward each other, determined for a deadly kiss.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

Pat later told me that he tried to close his eyes so he could spare himself of the destruction of earth. But his eyelids were transparent. And he had to suffer through all of it.

"AAA. AAAAAAAAAAAA. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA." Silence.

And so, Pat and I were floating in space. The rogue planet had knocked earth right off its orbit. We were standing in front of each other, me and Pat, just out of each other's reach. We were stuck in space, we couldn't move toward in any direction. We couldn't make any sound in space. We were prisoners in the universe's most exposed, agoraphobic prison. But We still figured out a way to communicate, we learnt to lipread. We talked to each other, of despair and happier times. We talked and talked and talked, without making a single sound, we talked and talked and talked and soon we had nothing to talk of and we still kept on talking.

We spent billions and billions years like that. Unable to do nothing but exist. I tried, for centuries and more, with my sheer willpower to move enough toward Pat just so I could touch him for once, just so I could feel something I had long ago forgotten how it felt. And I failed and I kept failing. Even ghost and poltergeists needed air to float around back on earth. And in space, there wasn't anything around us to get the slightest bit of reaction force out of.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. AAAAAAAA. AAAAAAAAAAAA."

Billions and billions years of existence, with nothing happening around us except planets moving and stars burning out and other space crap. It was... it was...

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

... it's not describable. It was boring. The word "bored" still makes me visualize a teenager chewing gum while in detention. It just sounds so simple. So... so not ominous. But it was. It was mind numbing. And again, the word mind numbing isn't enough to describe it. Muggles in mostly all of their various religions, have the concept of hell. A place of endless pain. A place made solely for the purpose of eternal fucking torment where God throws his servants and children who displeased him at. To me, hell sounds fun. Doesn't matter how agonizing, at least I'd have something to feel there in hell. I'd have the devil and his demons to keep me company. And when they whipped me with the whip of dread, I'd be actually able to hear my own screams. This, our situation, it was way way worse. We could feel nothing at all, not even pain, and that made us less than people. We were objects with consciousness.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

One day, no, let me correct that, at one point in time, I asked Pat, moving my mouth without being able to make any noise, "Have you noticed how much brighter the sun has become?"

And he replied, "Oh. Of course. All of sun's hydrogen is getting burned to helium. It's becoming a red giant."

I didn't know what it meant then but...

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. AAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

...I knew it wasn't good.

"If earth was still here," Pat told me, "the sun would've boiled its atmosphere and oceans away by now."

Pat told me a bunch of more scientific mumbo jumbo about what was going to happen. Most of it went over my head. But I did understand what was going to happen. And that was exactly what happened.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. AAAAAAAAAAAA. AAAAAA."

The sun expanded. It became brighter and brighter and brighter through millions and millions and millions of years and it kept expanding. Slowly, it expanded so much that it engulfed the both of us, it'd have engulfed earth if earth was still here. Before light, there was darkness. And before darkness, there was light. Blinding light. Not much different from darkness. I couldn't see horseshit. I tried turning tangible in hope that it'd kill me, that kind of stuff ought to kill you- getting engulfed by the sun itself, but I simply couldn't turn tangible. Why? Was it a defense mechanism of sort? Like how I couldn't turn tangible while being in the middle of going through a wall? Probably. Anyway, the sun engulfed us and it still kept expanding. And it kept on expanding, it kept on getting bigger and bigger and bigger through millions or billions of years, until it could no longer.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

And then the sun shrank. And it kept shrinking. Until it was even smaller than it was before. I could see Pat again, the brightness of the sun had died down. Pat told me that that was its white dwarf phase. That through trillions of years, the sun will slowly turn into a black dwarf. An invisible dead body of the sun, without any light or heat. Leaving us in darkness.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

So I asked him, "When will it stop, Pat? Will it ever stop? When will everything just fucking stop? When will we catch a break?"

And he told me, "The universe is expanding, Peeves. All the matter in the universe, from stars and galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles and even spacetime itself will slowly be torn apart in the Big Rip by the expansion of the universe. Something tells me we won't survive that."

I didn't understand what any of it meant. But I understood that somewhere in the future, I may finally get relief. That hope still existed in the universe.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAA. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

The sun has long ago died to blackness. And darkness has consumed us. Pat is just in front of me, but I can't see him, I'm only aware of his existence. And when it comes down to it, I'm now nothing more than a being aware of its dull, continued existence either.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. AAAAAAAAA. AAAAAAAAAAA."

I am Peeves. I was once the embodiment of mischievousness. An annoying but ultimately welcome distraction at Hogwarts. Now I am no one. In a dead solar system of nothingness. A character in a cosmic horror story. Screaming my intangible lungs out, wishing I could listen to myself scream. I scream to condemn the universe. I scream to remind myself of who I was. Who I am. And I will keep screaming, through eternity as I wait for the universe to simply freeze or tear itself apart. As I wait for something that might or might not happen, something that even if it happened, might or might not finally give me relief that I so require and help me escape from my existence. I scream and I keep screaming, I try to scream myself through all of it.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA..."

...

Author's note: So yeah, am sure the story has grammatical errors and scientific inaccuracies, but, you know, ignore them. Gotta admit the concept is cool, eh? Anyway, review the story if you got time. All kinds of criticism appreciated.


End file.
